Sick pictures everyone . I wish I knew how to use my DSLR and process images even half as well as you guys. Maybe one day...

Three essential needs for that:

1. Practice

2. Practice

3. Practice

I spend a lot of time (maybe too much) just farting around with Photoshop and other processing software just to pick up a technique I may use later. If you can't swing Photoshop, try GIMP. It's free. Then Google GIMP (or Photoshop) tutorials and follow along. You'll learn. Just takes practice.

Today I felt like spending an hour or so during a work break to check out tilt-shift photography. I found tutorials on how to do this using any picture. Of course it would be better to use a tilt-shift lens, but those are expensive and require some time to learn how to use them. I decided to check out the photoshop/post-processing route just for fun.

Hereís one I came up with. The original photo isnít all that great, and there was no editing done on it to save time. What do you think of the tilt-shift version?

Yeah, usually with these, the "subject" is in focus and the rest is not. I was looking at the...um, dockhouses (?) as the subject.

Just curious, do you know anything about these structures? Can anyone just "build onto" the existing floating village? Must be a very cool place to spend the summer.

Yeah, the houseboats were the subject. The reason the top part of the houseboats were also blurred out is because a tighter subject area gave a better effect in this case. I tried to widen the focused area, but the result wasn't as good.

I'd be lying if I told you I knew much about these. I think these were built along the docks in empty spaces. I think right now they are all taken up, and it's very expensive to own one of those. One of the boathouses (not in this particular pic) was supposedly in the movie Sleepless in Seattle (which I haven't seen).

They are pretty expensive, imo. It's prolly not worth buying unless you have a true passion for it (kind of like a dedicated macro lens), or if you have a paying client who wants a job professionally done.